#phil strub

Godzilla movies vary enormously, from goofy to serious, from smart to utterly moronic.  In this subscribercast we look at the 2014 Godzilla that launched Legendary’s Monsterverse and compare it to the more recent Godzilla Minus One, a Toho production.  The former was supported by the DOD and inverts Godzilla lore, making nuclear weapons the solution to the monster problem rather than the cause of…

I hate reality TV but it’s cheap, nasty and has taken over the TV entertainment industry. In this episode we look at collaborations between the US military and reality TV shows, from Cake Boss to America’s Funniest People. I trace the history of this relationship over multiple decades, including a period when the Pentagon essentially banned its entertainment liaison offices from working with the…

1981’s Das Boot is one of the world’s most famous anti-war films as well as one of its longest – the shortest cut is 149 minutes, with some versions more than double that.  The film has been widely praised but it provoked the ire of military film historian Larry Suid who, 15 years after Das Boot came out, entered into a pointless feud with the film’s technical advisor involving the US Naval…

I honestly wish I didn’t have to write and talk about the plagiarism of my work so frequently but in the last few years it has become fairly constant.  One part of me says that this is a mark of success, another part of me wants to slash open the eyeballs of these hacks and squeeze lime juice into them.  For the moment, I will settle for simply naming names and telling the story and giving away…

Big, western films about the wars in the former Yugoslavia are rare, and to my knowledge the only one that got production support from the Pentagon was Behind Enemy Lines, the 2001 shoot down and rescue story set in the war in Bosnia.  Much like Owen Wilson’s journey through Bosnian Serb territory, the passage to getting military approval was not a simple one, involving nearly two years of…

True Lies is one of the easier-to-spot blockbusters that enjoyed US military support, and fulfilled a long-term fantasy for the Marine Corps, of seeing the Harrier jump jet feature prominently, and heroically.  The Marine Corps and DOD file on the movie shows how enthusastic they were for an Arnold Schwarzenegger-fronted action comedy which culminates with him using the Harrier to kill…

Kevin Gosztola joins us to talk about his new Medium publication The Wide Shot, a film review and industry analysis outlet. We discuss some of the films he has highlighted so far including American Fiction and M3gan, as well as the depressing state of most modern film journalism. The conversation rounds off with us talking about David Robb, the author of Operation Hollywood, and Phil Strub, the…